In the episode of ‘The High Profit Event Show’, host Rudy Rodriguez engages in a captivating discussion with guest Dominic Hrabe, the Chief Community Officer of Redwoods Crypto. Throughout this episode, Dominic provides a comprehensive overview of his experiences and strategies in managing highly successful events within the dynamic crypto industry.

The conversation delves into various aspects of event planning and execution, specifically tailored for the crypto sector. Dominic emphasizes the significance of community engagement, sharing effective strategies to build and nurture a community through these events. He also discusses the intricacies of speaker coordination, highlighting the use of personal networks and LinkedIn as valuable resources.

A key focus of the episode is on balancing high-quality event production with budget limitations, a crucial aspect of event management. Dominic stresses the need for adaptability in planning, a vital trait given the rapidly evolving nature of the crypto industry. He also shares innovative promotion strategies, including forming partnerships and targeted marketing, to attract attendees.

Creating memorable experiences for attendees is another area covered, with tips on selecting the right venue and incorporating engaging activities. In terms of sales and conversion, Dominic offers insights into converting attendees into high-paying clients, a critical aspect of event success.

The episode highlights Redwoods Crypto's commitment to the environment sharing their non-profit, as they support planting redwood tree seedlings for every member, contributing to the conservation of Redwoods.

To conclude, Rudy Rodriguez extends his gratitude to Dominic Hrabe for his valuable insights and encourages listeners to follow Redwoods Crypto for more information on the crypto and blockchain space.

Want to connect with Dominic?

Website: https://redwoodscrypto.com/

Dominic’s Email: Dominic@redwoodscrypto.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-hrabe-pharm-d-4659094/

Redwoods Crypto LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/redwoods/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ddhizzle

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/redwoodscrypto/

Hi and welcome. This is Rudy Rodriguez with The High Event Profit Show and on today's show, we have a very special guest, Mr. Dominic, who actually has been in the event space since 2018. Interestingly enough, in the crypto space, I know there's a lot of interest in crypto, and he's hosted over a dozen events, has over 4000 people who've attended his event as paying customers, has coordinated over 250 speakers who've spoken. Even recently, Dominic, you and I had that opportunity to play together at a recent event. So we're excited to have you on the show. I think today the show title is something along the lines of teaching us how to really best serve our community with live events and how to get more high paying clients right now. So excited to have you on. Welcome, Dominic. We'd love to jump right into the meat and potatoes for our audience and start talking about some of your experience and some of your suggestions on the show topic. So love to hear from you, man. You recently did an event just like a month ago or so. Very successful from what I could tell. I'm curious to learn from you. What are some of the things that you do to prepare before an event? Looking back now, what's the advice you gave yourself before you did your most recent event?

Thanks, Rudy. I appreciate that. And thanks for having me on again. It's a pleasure to be here. It's events, they add gray hair. So they're pretty stressful, but really rewarding. I find them to be really rewarding. I'm an extrovert by nature. So my fiance says, you're naturally made for events and now you're hosting them. So it's great. It's also a way for us to serve our community. So that's the number one thing that we're really trying to accomplish is to serve, serve our existing community of members and also obviously collect more. So one of the things that we like to do is really forecast out at least a few months of runway of what exactly needs to be done. When does it need to be done? So we're very structural that way. You also helped us with that towards the end of that was really important. So it's great to have you integrated into that process. But one of the things is, you need to identify, obviously, if you're going to have some external speakers. Is it just going to be you leading the event? You're going to have external speakers for us. We're going to have some external speakers. So being able to at least have those existing relationships to call on. Or if you need to secure those relationships and you need to allocate some time for that. So that's really important. So it depends on where you're starting as an event organizer. Are you doing it for the first time or are you doing this as a subsequent time? And you already have an existing network of speakers that you'd like to bring in? I know for us, the first year that we did it, we had no brand recognition. We had no name. We had none of that. So we really had to pound the table and go and get that ourselves. That was one of the things that I did that first year. And I crushed LinkedIn doing it. Literally LinkedIn was our sole resource for being able to secure speakers to speak at our event.

Another thing, too, is that you'll find that from a budgetary standpoint, you may not have a budget to pay a lot of speakers. So for us, fortunately, we never had to pay them. There were maybe a few speakers, really high profile ones that we paid. But by and large, we didn't we didn't really compensate them other than room, hotel accommodations, things like that on occasion, some air travel. But, that's one thing that you really have to consider is how many speakers you can have. Now, if you're not doing trade show style events like we did the first couple of years, then maybe your budgets aren't as big as what ours was.

So really having an idea on what that looks like and crystal clear vision of what that is, is really important. From a syntax standpoint, knowing what that is, what you're optimizing for. Now you can start to kind of build in a flow. Again, knowing whether you're going to have outside speakers or not, or if it's going to be all internal, that's going to obviously determine how much more runway that you need to plan for. But, for us, doing that about our last event we did, let's see here, we really had about two months of planning to do it. So we didn't have a lot of time. So fortunately, a good team behind us was able to really execute on that. But also, with what goes on in our ecosystem, at least maybe it is for some of the people that are listening to this, is that there's so much going on in the world right now. With our industry, crypto I mean, one month in cryptos like a decade in any other industry. So you have to really be flexible. So having flexibility also built into your event agenda and your syntax is extraordinarily important because you may have an idea, two months out of what you want to talk about, but then all of a sudden something massive in your industry happens, and you need to include it.

Very cool. I appreciate you sharing all that and all your experience with preparation and speaking of speakers. I was very impressed by the lineup that you guys had at your recent event. I mean, they were world class speakers, great engagement, like people were in the room, most of the time, like they weren't in the hall, chit chatting, they were in the room, they were so engaged. So thank you for sharing some of your strategies around lining up great speakers.

I'll actually add a little bit even before that. So, as it pertains to LinkedIn itself is going to the speaker themselves is probably, you could try that, but the first year that I did outreach script because, as anybody knows, you know when you get all those LinkedIn messages you sense, how much of them are canned and and copy written, and how much of them are actually legitimate and with this person actually writing a thoughtful message. So I'd encourage you guys to definitely read the message back as if you were the recipient of it. Is this thing canned, is this thing, could this be construed as something it's just spam? If so, change it, throw it away and in fact maybe even start with small messages to begin with just to kind of get them to message you back.

Then you're able to obviously go to speakers who have already spoken at your event. You can utilize their networks, which the second year that we produced an event, we had more speakers that we could possibly handle. We were sending people away. We were a lot more discerning that second year than we were the first year. That's just a tale of two years between having no reputation in the space to then establish yourself as having a very solid reputation. So, I wanted to address that. The other thing as far as planning is concerned, is you really got to identify what kind of event you are really optimizing for. Are you optimizing for a high end event? Are you selling a 50k mastermind? It starts before that and the experience of actually registering. So all of these types of things. Think of ways that you can do it to a higher degree, to a higher level, with additional nuance that is, you can do it with a little bit more of a nuance that kind of makes them feel additionally supported. Rudy, we've talked about some creative white ideas and stuff that you can do online to reward people who register by sending them lunch to their house, grub, having lunch to their house. Things like this that create that extra level of that two millimeter shift as you like to call it, which I love.

So that's why we hosted our event on The Las Vegas Strip. The first event was at the Aria hotel. Second event was at the Cosmopolitan the next year. Having it at these really high profile places really puts you on the map. Venue is really important. Now obviously it costs a lot of money to do that so that may not be in your budget, but you have to kind of understand what it is that you're optimizing for. If you're going to sell a $50,000 mastermind on the back end, you probably don't want to have it at a Redroof Inn. So, these are just things you need to consider.

That's a great point that I think makes it overlooked is, what is the whole experience being created including where's the hotel? You're asking for 50 grand, 100 grand, 30 grand, you probably want to be somewhere nice. Creating that experience all the way through, it also anchors their experience right when people are walking to a hotel and they have glass chandeliers and great service and great food. That the whole experience is connected to you and your event. One of the things I appreciate about you, Dominic and the Redwoods team, at your recent event is you guys provided breakfast, lunch and dinner, and like cocktails and all sorts of networking opportunities at no additional cost, really just being there and I was blown away by the experience that you guys created for your participants. Pretty cool. I think I would be remiss to step over the fact that you're a great event promoter as well. I mean, you've had over 4000 paid attendees at your events in the last few years and curious to ask man, like what works? What works for you in the realm of getting people to buy tickets and come to your events?

Well that's being in an industry that is growing. That is very important. With crypto, the amount of people now, I will say this. I will say that we had the first year, that we were in the first year that we did an event in 2018, it was actually in a crypto bear market.

So until after we did the event, we didn't recognize how significant what we had accomplished by having 2000 people there that year. Now, truth be told, we did give away a portion of those tickets to get people there. I've still sold over 4000 tickets over the course of two years, but that first year we did have to. We didn't have to create some additional incentives to get people to come up, but by doing that we also established our reputation. So that was really important. So I would say that, from a promotion standpoint, having promotional partners is extraordinarily important. Having people who are going to vouch for you and expose you to their audiences is supremely important. I mean we still have people that talk about our conferences back in 2018 2019 still to this day. I was actually listening to a YouTube video the other day of a guy who was an influencer that was on one of our panels back then, and he was talking about us, and I'm like dude the last time we did an event for that company was back in 2019 pre pandemic. So to still be talked about in admirable terms, many years later it obviously means, that we did something right.

Thanks for sharing that, because you are really good at putting them into your point. The thing I took away is being in a growing market, a growing industry where there's a lot of interest. Very important and you are in a very growing point by one of the fastest growing markets on the planet. So, I'd have to agree.

Let's see that was in June, I would say May, June, there's over 13,000 people at that event in Miami. So that gives you a clue not only of how much the market has grown, but the difference between being in a bear market and being in a bull market. You're talking about over six x increases from from. I mean that's huge, that's the difference between you losing money on an event, and you absolutely crushing it. So, granted, those things are considerable, you can't ignore where you're at in a cycle, like if you're hosting an event and it's in a bear market. Okay, or we're in a macro economic decline. Maybe you need to change your pricing structure, or maybe now you're doing a virtual event instead of an online or instead of a live event. So to reduce costs, because if you've ever hosted a live event, you understand that all your costs, most of your costs, are going to the hotel or the venue. Things can change pretty quickly and if you can't adjust to something like maybe you have a host hosting a live event you need to switch to a virtual event. Something like that. You do need to be aware of that otherwise you can wipe yourself out pretty quickly, pretty easily if you're not careful.

For sure man thanks for the highlight on that. I'm sure there's many listeners here who are investing in crypto and are very aware of some of those factors as well but get your point, whatever industry you're in doing an event and you have to be aware of where you're at in the cycle of that industry. So speaking about the event itself, Dominic, you really hit the stage very well at this event. I know you put in a lot of preparation to make sure that you captivated your audience during the event or some of the things that you focused on during the event to create that community and ultimately to get lead to those high paying clients.

Being able to weave that messaging into the presentation of the pitch, I think, was extraordinarily important. Because I probably know some of that but I didn't know all of it and know it to the degree and then implementing it obviously and then practicing it. Then we practice that thing a lot. And that's another thing I would say, if you're doing a pitch, having adequate time to really, really practice that I think is supremely valuable.

Awesome. For the listeners who are referring to, so we're talking about personality archetypes, and what we did is we had a little mnemonic way of remembering the four different disc profiles, the four main categories and how to be able to speak little two millimeter shifts about like standing tall, not moving side to side. I'm a pacer when I get on stage. I like to pace, I like to walk.

I feel more comfortable doing it but a lot of times that's not most effective, you need to really stay in your center. To be centered when you're delivering those important elements of the presentation and so you helping me really develop that muscle memory for that was really important. I think it relates well to the community and to the audience.

Most definitely did a great job there man. So it brings us to the point of the event where it's time to make the invitation time to ask people to raise their hand, and to become members of your community at a higher level. Tell us a little bit about what your approach was at this most recent event and how you went about doing it. People are always curious to wonder how they ask for the sale. How did they enroll people into their master program? So you can speak to that for a little bit.

Be happy to. So what was interesting is we started with an application. So because we're doing a high end mastermind, our offers are $30k. Now we did do a payment plan that we offer to people but the offer is $30k and to offer that from stage feels a little bit interesting. So instead of doing that.

It was just essentially kind of like what we're looking for; it was really underscoring. What would make a good fit with us, what is it that we are promising to deliver. And so that you have an understanding of what that is so that way you're minimizing questions by doing that, but you're also really trying to qualify that other person, like hey, I'm not a good fit for this. Okay great, then you understand that you're not a good fit, or someone who wants to aspire to be that good fit, now it makes them want to move to the next step.

So, because we have had bad fits in the past and that doesn't serve them and it doesn't serve us because we're not going to let everybody in. Now we're having to deal with things that we don't want to deal with from the county perspective and then just customer satisfaction things like that we want to make sure that we are a good fit from the get go. So really it's emphasizing the importance to the audience that hey, be as thorough as you possibly can in these questions, and that that document that you helped us create and really custom tailor for our audience was really important Rudy. So, having that now they've completed that. They paid the $497. That's the application fee that we instilled. You guys might have a different application fee that you want to do. Ours was $497. Now, we have an interested buyer, we've got somebody who's raised their hand, literally and figuratively, we've got somebody who's raised their hand and said, I am interested, I want to move to the next step of whatever you guys are offering.

Great statistics and to show them like where they're at and so many people especially in your space thought they were maybe too late to get in and that you made a really solid case and it just seemed like the natural next step to be part of your community, to take advantage of such an amazing timing in the marketplace and timing on the planet. I love how you meet with people individually and qualify them and manage your expectations so that they know what you're getting, they know what they're getting.

Like I said, there's nothing worse than having a bad fit, you don't want a bad fit in your community, and I know many people, many gurus in the past who are all marketing gurus and say, hey listen find out who your ideal client is, and the more ideal clients that you can have, the more it's not going to feel like work because it's a part of your family and they're a part of who you are and who you're trying to serve at the highest level. But you find someone who's not an ideal client and quite the contrary. It's going to really complicate your life, and it's going to create unnecessary strife for you and for them. So not being afraid to say no if I'm saying that properly. So, don't be afraid to say no.

100%. Thank you for sharing that. Don't be afraid to disqualify someone. Everybody's not a fit. Thanks for sharing that. So this kind of brings to the part of our interview where we're gonna do some rapid fire quick questions just to kind of see what you got to share with us here. What would you say are three secrets that you learned, three strategies that you learned from your most recent events that would help people to have profitable and impactful events. What are your top three?

Well, I'd say, really allocating time to connect with people off stage. So many people they're not going to, like you're going to open up for q&a and things like that but people aren't going to have the courage to ask questions from their seats, especially with a smaller, more intimate event. Our last event was around 100 people. So it's even smaller but you still going to get those people that are not going to ask those questions. So being able to really connect with people, and not only that but you're going to have an opportunity to really find out what their wants, needs, and desires are. How invaluable it is to understand what their wants, needs and desires are. Now you can really speak to that and help them and help serve them, and why being a part of your community at a higher level is so, so valuable. So that's one thing. Another secret is, there's little things you can do that really go a long way that are not that expensive. So for us for this event, we did not have a big budget to do this event. It was kind of like we're serving two purposes. Before we even hosted the event we were serving our existing clientele but we also wanted to open it up for potentially new clients, and we were producing our event on the back end of another major event from someone else who is a big titan in the space. I don't want to mention their name but there is somebody who has our target market inside of our community. So many in their community could also be part of our community. So we hosted an event on the backside of their event. It was free for them to come in. So, being able to really attract them was great. However, it required an enormous amount of flexibility, because prior to that, prior to our first event, we did not know if we were going to have 30 guests, we didn't know if we're going to have 100 guests.

I'd say, oh I know, I was going to say the two millimeter things, so the small little nuance things. So having a step and repeat, having a good videographer there to really capture some B roll and some testimonials. Asking the right questions for your testimonials because if you're not optimizing for good testimonials that you're missing an opportunity to really create a good sizzle video and a good sizzle reel later that you're going to use in your marketing. So, having those types of things, and those are the types of things that I wouldn't recommend skimping a budget on, pay a little bit more for a videographer that really knows what they're doing and that can edit and cut that to the point where it's going to really produce sales. That's something that you don't want to negotiate dollars and cents on.

I definitely saw the power of a good videographer who recently had events and the B roll, and how that helps down the road too. Awesome man. Thanks for sharing these three quick tips there. What would you say is a book or maybe a resource that you would recommend to people who want to host profitable live events.

That's a good question. I don't know about a book necessarily, a resource is what I would just do is I would model other events. I would connect with other event organizers whether they're in your same industry or other industries, find out who they're using, find out who's who. But you have really no choice if you're going to end up using hotels that are unionized hotels so that's another two millimeter thing that I'd make sure that you're looking at is the hotel, you know, is this a unionized venue, because you're going to pay more for it, you're going to pay more for everything. I mean like when I first heard about how much we had to pay for a cup of coffee on the Las Vegas strip I about lost my mind. That was before inflation, imagine what it is now. So, those things you have to really, really consider. So what I'd recommend is just finding other other event organizers, obviously maybe you don't want to approach event organizers in your industry but find some event organizers in other industries that are similar in size. So like if you're running a mastermind, who's another mastermind and a similar or maybe a different niche, who's done it many years before, or hey I use this ad company and I've had really good results, or I use this company for lanyards, and had really good results or I've had this videographer for instance. So, don't try to reinvent the wheel.

There's other professionals out there that again, you're going to want to find. But just doing a Google search may not yield you the right people, the right ad person. Now fortunately, I have a good friend of mine who's been in advertising for 20 years, and he's done a lot of the top digital marketers events over that 20 years. Who's a master at what they do? Go learn from them, have an immersive experience with them, pay them. Then train with them and learn that the same thing applies with events. It's important to model and learn from others.

The same thing we're doing Rudy for our customers is the same thing. It's literally just a recipe that you just keep, you just keep using the same recipe no matter what you're doing, whether it's an event, or whether you're serving your customers with it, same thing.

Awesome, man. Thank you. And Dominic for our listeners here for people who want to learn more about you and your service in your company and work, how can they reach you and what's the best way?

Great. You can go to our website. You can go to redwoodscrypto.com and there we have a free newsletter that we give out to people who are interested in keeping up to date with crypto. And you can email me at Dominic, d-o-m-i-n-i-c at redwoodscryto.com

Awesome, I appreciate that man. And from a curious perspective, what would you say is the next summit, the next goal that you want to climb and what would you say is the greatest perceived challenge or obstacle that you want to overcome?

We already have an idea on another event that we can do. We're going to do it later, well, late summer early fall, a live event. Our goal is to do two to three virtual events this year, so that'll be unique, because having done live events and then moving into a virtual thing with my dogs barking in the background that's going to be fun. Like, a Tony Robbins did a virtual event recently. Going from virtual events to live events, I thought would be nowhere near the same experience.

And I was astounded. Now obviously he's the best in the industry at what he does. He's been doing this for many, many years. But for him to pivot from virtual from live events to virtual events, and for it to still be the the quality that it was, I was astounded, I couldn't believe how great it was. I mean I'm sitting there with my daughter and we're having a blast and we're jumping around. It was like we were at a rock concert in our house. Now for me to be able to share that with her in a virtual environment is not something I would have been able to do when doing live events, take her out of school for a week and then take her to take her to Chicago to go to a live event, but now in this virtualized environment this this this economy that we live in that's now virtualized is it enables that to happen. Granted it's harder to keep people's attention. But if we can do that, if we can captivate people's attention and keep them glued to our messages from a virtual environment, think about how many more people you can scale to, how many more eyeballs you can get access to. Moving forward, the virtuals will be here and there'll be combinations of the two hybrids or what have you.

Congratulations on setting the target of two to three virtual events this year. That's exciting and I look forward to seeing how that develops and again, one more last personal question here- what's the legacy you want to leave Dominic, when it's all said and done, what do you want to be remembered for?

That's a really great question. I appreciate it. In 2017, I had the light bulb moment. A lot of people experience this kind of Eureka moment in their life where they're like nothing. And so having that realization has driven my behavior. I redesigned my entire career. I used to be a pharmacist before all this, like, believe it or not, it kind of doesn't really match my identity. But it was sore, I'm told. I redesigned that and shifted perspective and completely changed my career path. My goal and my purpose now is to carry that torch and share with as many people the enthusiasm that I have for this technology and how big of an opportunity it is. So my legacy is if I can just help one small person to really kind of open that just for that light bulb moment to go on for them. I've done my service.

That's awesome man. I appreciate you sharing that and for people who are still listening at this point I do recommend, follow their company, go to redwoodscrypto.com, get on their mailing list. Dominic, you guys have a nonprofit I believe that you support. Can you just just really briefly share a little bit about the cause and give a quick shout out for that and we'll leave a link for it in our show notes as well.

Absolutely. Thanks, I appreciate that. So the genesis of how we were created was we were inspired by a meditation that our founder, Dj Alma, and so he had a meditation he was actually in the Redwoods forest and he, one of these things that he was wondering about is like, how to create a very anti fragile portfolio. And so, Redwood trees, suffice it to say I won't go into the real details here but they're one of the most anti fragile organisms in the world. So for every member that we have that comes in we plant a redwood tree seedling for them. So it's important for us to save the Redwoods because with everything going on in the world and how things are changing and climates and all that stuff. They're being impacted just like many other different things, many other different nuances throughout the climate. So that's near and dear to us. So saving the Redwoods is a cause that we like to support.

Awesome, thanks for sharing that. We'll be sure to share a link with our listeners as well. Well Dominic has been a pleasure having you on as our special guest today. Thank you for sharing your expertise not only in events but also in the crypto and blockchain space and your enthusiasm for sharing that with other people. It's really appreciated. Thank you so much man, wishing well on your endeavors and for the audience listening to the show if you found value, please be sure to give it a like or a comment.